ZumoDrive review

ZumoDrive doesn't claim to be a Cloud storage and synchronisation service, rendering our complaints that it lacks automatic sync moot. Instead, it's pitched as a hybrid storage service aimed at sharing media files across a range of systems, giving access to all your photos, music and video files from anywhere.

It's designed to intelligently cache your files. You drag them into the online folder, and it will sync local copies of those it thinks you're likely to need to other connected machines, then stream other files when required. What's more, you can manually sync files and folders just by right-clicking on them and requesting to keep a local copy.

This streaming technology is ZumoDrive's biggest strength, allowing systems with minimal storage capacity to access video files or a larger number of audio files than they might normally be able to hold, but with practically instant access. This makes even more sense when you consider that ZumoDrive has a free client for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Video files need some buffering, and even then they don't always run smoothly, but music files stream very well. It's also possible to share non-DRM files and give guests the rights to access the stream but not download or edit.

ZumoDrive is a friendly service with an easy-to-use client and a very usable web browser interface. Unfortunately, it isn't brilliant value for money. The free service is limited to a miserable 1GB, while the price for 50GB of space compares poorly with Humyo, Syncplicity, SugarSync and Dropbox. As SugarSync offers similarly powerful media-handling features and proper sync, this kicks ZumoDrive out of the running.

Author: Stuart Andrews